“You’re a thought criminal!” said the boy to protagonist Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984. This comes to mind when pondering stories of parents who get “canceled” by their own children. Oh, they’re not called thought criminals. They’re just not called — for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or any other time because they dared be awakened to Truth in a “woke” time.
We’ve heard about this for a while. “‘You are no longer my mother, because you are voting for Trump,’” lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez, 41, was told by her 21-year-old son last year. Now Meadowlark Press writer Caryn Boddie relates her own experiences being canceled by her kids, along with those of others she knows of who are enduring the same fate.
Writing at American Thinker, Boddie cites the final chapter of socialist author Saul “the Red” Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals (1971). Titled “The Way Forward,” it states, “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class. That is where the power is[.] … Large parts of the middle class, the ‘silent majority,’ must be activated[.]”
And so it has come to pass. Middle class herself and stating that her “cancelation is the fruit of the left’s strategy to remake America,” Boddie writes:
It was shocking to us that our children canceled us for being who and what we are; we have tried to be good and true parents, faithful and patriotic. We are heartbroken, blame ourselves, blame our children, reach out and plead and cajole, pray and pray and pray and ask others to pray, too.
… This is happening to many middle-class families. For example, I met a friend the other day, and she told me she has several friends whose children are canceling them. One of them is a mother with whom my friend was close as their kids grew up. She said this person was an excellent mother, but now her son will have nothing to do with her and is calling her an abusive mother.
My friend’s own son canceled her and her husband, too. The son told his mother that everything they taught him was a lie. Before he canceled them, he forbade his mother to talk to him about God anymore.
Years ago, my children also told me I was not allowed to talk to them about God anymore.
Both of us told our children that we would not proselytize, but we could not promise never to mention God because we are people of faith; it is who we are.
When my husband posted on Facebook about our plight, more than a few friends responded that they were going through the same things. One mother said her three children will have nothing to do with her anymore and had recently left her out of a family wedding. She said she is also a person of faith.
Providing yet more detail, Boddie points out that her kids hated President Trump with almost demonic passion. She mentions that it upset their daughter when she and her husband expressed concern to their governor, Jared Polis, D-Colo., about lockdowns (they then apologized to her). But the January 6 trespassing incident was the final straw; even though the Boddies weren’t even in Washington, D.C., that day, their children disowned them. All communication ceased.
These incidents bring to mind Antifa, says Boddie, whose members fit the profile here: They tend to be spoiled, middle- or upper-middle-class, white young adults. And she and many others want to know how this intergenerational chasm was created.
Of course, the saying “An idle mind is the Devil’s playground” suggests itself, and this surely is a factor. People toiling away in fields under a hot sun 12 hours a day earning a subsistence living don’t generally give expositions upon white privilege. But there’s more to it.
The African saying “It takes a village to raise a child” was co-opted and corrupted by Hillary Clinton. Yet there’ll always be a village — and sometimes it can raze a child (or at least his soul).
This is the case today with our now toxic culture (the “village”). Anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-American, anti-Western, pro-socialist, relativistic, sexualized, and perverse — though I repeat myself — ideas abound, and your children will generally be infected with them commensurate with their exposure to our schools, entertainment, and media. Staggering to many are this reality’s implications:
Parents must insulate their kids from the culture and become their own “village” until the youngsters’ moral compasses and emotional foundations are fully formed.
There are plenty of groups doing this, from Amish to Hasidim to certain Mormons, and they often manage to raise children radically different from wider-society kids (for good or for ill, though usually for the better, depending on the given sub-culture). The point is that it’s absolutely possible to forge youngsters who reject the age’s spirit. But you can’t be what Boddie said she and her husband are: meek people.
This isn’t to demean them; I’ve no doubt they’re wonderful. But the civilization- and soul-destroyers aren’t meek about indoctrinating your kids — you must be equally aggressive about protecting them.
Some will now say that it’s the parents’ “values” that really matter. Famous last words. For this is a bit like saying that we shouldn’t worry about what children may ingest outside the home because it’s the nutrition they get within it that really matters. Of course, if the poison they imbibe is toxic enough, no amount of good nutrition will save them. So it often is with moral and spiritual poison.
Moreover, as a great friend once pointed out, outsiders’ influence can often exceed that of the parents. Why? Because the children know that since their parents’ love is unconditional, they don’t have to toe dad’s and mom’s line to receive it. Yet acceptance by peers and teachers very well will be contingent upon embracing their “culture.”
Also remember that children aren’t born angels but are sin-disposed beings susceptible to seductive appeals, and vice is a much easier sell than virtue. Furthermore, once the seduction is complete and kids have an emotional attachment to vice, their judgment will be corrupted and they’ll often reject reason’s dictates when adults.
Yet there is a way to forestall this fate. You can homeschool. You can isolate kids from modern culture and media propaganda. You can keep them away from bad-influence peers. This is done all the time; there are parents deciding to do it even as I write this.
Either you’ll mold your children or modern culture will. That’s the choice. And if the prescribed course here seems radical, just ask yourself what sounds more so: Raising children in a smaller but purer world, or allowing kids to be indoctrinated with extreme, hateful ideas by a society that has become radically wrong.
